


Meta: Carol and age difference

by Splinter



Category: Carol (2015), Charade (1963)
Genre: Age Difference, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 08:51:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17019585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Splinter/pseuds/Splinter





	Meta: Carol and age difference

Something I really enjoyed in Carol: it doesn’t ignore the gap in age between Carol and Therese. It’s written and played as a key element in the relationship, part of the attraction for both of them.

It’s there in countless little moments (and this is a film that makes little moments feel momentous). In the lunch scene, Carol orders eggs, creamed spinach and a dry martini. When Therese says, “I’ll have the same”, it’s clear she wasn’t quite sure what to order, that she’s copying and admiring Carol’s sophistication. When Therese gives Carol a jazz record, that feels like a present across an age gap - it fits with Therese’s younger, artistic milieu, something she can introduce Carol to. The first time they go to bed, Carol exclaims that her own body was never like Therese’s, reacting both to her youth and to her personal, individual beauty.

And that is so rare in Hollywood movies, which routinely cast younger women with older men but sort of pretend they’re both 29. (Does David O. Russell believe Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper are the same age?)

Hollywood has always been sexist (and racist, and…) but it’s actually got worse at this. Someone like Audrey Hepburn was often cast with significantly older co-stars, but the stories generally acknowledged the gap. In the 1963 movie Charade, she and Cary Grant run around around Paris being fabulous. Mostly she’s chasing him, with teasing about age on both sides. Like the scene where she picks up his reading glasses. "I bet you don't really need those," she says, then looks through them: 

"You need them."

Charade is fluffy where Carol is intense, but they both show characters reacting to the reality of each other. The they’re-both-29-honest approach seems to happen unthinkingly: male stars get to be romantic leads past 50, and are provided with love interests who are automatically cast with women under 35. (Remembering Maggie Gyllenhall being told she was “too old” at 37 to play the love interest to a 55-year-old co-star.) And that chimes in with how often those female roles are desperately underwritten. She’s the love interest, that’s what she’s there for, so why bother asking what she sees in a significantly older person? Or what he sees in her, beyond “she’s a hot chick”?


End file.
